Tim Draper backed Tesla, SpaceX, Skype, Robinhood, Hotmail, and many others before anyone believed in them.
I don't know a single elected official politician who has won an election going against cryptocurrency. I think they've been crushed.
Now, ask him about the one Bitcoin call he says he'd take back. Here's what he said.
Yeah, it's always been a mistake to let it go.
And he's not hedging on where it goes from here either.
I think it does hit my 250,000 number by May or June.
Now, he won't tell you who he thinks Satoshi is. He says that's going to the grave with him. He will tell you why he thinks corporate treasuries sitting on the sidelines are already behind. But first, here's the question everyone in Bitcoin wants answered right now. Is the bottom already behind us? And again, remember, nothing in this video is financial advice. It's for educational purposes only.
Guys, it is an absolute pleasure of mine to bring such a legend like Tim Draper to the show. I hope that you guys appreciate that. So, without further ado, welcome Tim Draper. Tim, welcome to the channel. It's really great to have you here. I really appreciate your time. I know you don't do a lot of these, so thank you again for doing this.
My pleasure and great to be a part of it. And thanks Kyle for having me on your show.
Recently we had Ben Cowen on and he said the probability of the Bitcoin low being in probably isn't in yet, meaning that we're still likely to go lower. Do you think he's right or have we already seen the bottom? And when do you think the Bitcoin top is?
Bitcoin bottom? Yeah, I probably do because probabilistically, because the halving, I mean like if oil production were cut in half, the price of oil would go up. Bitcoin production will be cut in half in effect because the miners can only mine half and they tend to be the sales into the market. They tend to mine and sell into the market because that's their business. And so the amount of Bitcoin will be cut in half. That's in May or June or something. So I suspect that in anticipation of that we're going to see a rise in the Bitcoin price and as we hit the halving, I think we'll see a really big rise. So yeah, but that's just the price. You know, the way I look at Bitcoin is if I've got dollars and I know that the government is spending a lot of dollars, more than they have, then one of two things is going to happen. Then the dollar is going to be worth less, which means we're going to have hyperinflation, or interest rates are going to jump way up, which means banks are going to fail, and then we're going to have panic. And in both cases, I'm sure anybody who's responsible for a treasury of any kind should own about six months worth of Bitcoin because if you're in a family, you got to make sure you got enough time to just take care of the family, the mortgage, the payments, the food, the clothing. And if you're the treasurer of a corporation, you've got to be prepared to make payroll. And at first I was thinking they need two to four weeks of payroll. But if you really want to continue your business, not just fulfill your legal responsibilities as a board or management, you really need about six months worth if there is a collapse in the dollar. And I mean governments from both sides of the aisle, by the way, the aisle should not exist. Our representatives should be alphabetical in that chamber so that the conservatives and the liberals will be able to sit together and talk it out loud and come to good compromises. But right now they just want to throw grenades at each other. But both sides spend too much. They spend more than they have. So we borrow more and so the interest on our borrowing is starting to get higher than the income. And the weird thing is if you lower taxes you end up actually with more income. If you raise taxes people leave. And that's what's happened to California. They raised the taxes and the regulations so high that they're losing all of these people who have generated so many jobs. So they have people on the street and they're wondering why. Anyway, I digress a little there, but in any case, like if Apple has all of those dollars and if we have a banking crisis, those dollars are going to be potentially worthless. And what that means is that they are being irresponsible to not have at least some hedge in Bitcoin. I think the board is liable first, they are liable for at least two weeks or four weeks of employees to pay the employees, but if they want to be a responsible board they should be holding six months worth of employment salaries in Bitcoin. So, I think we are kind of moving toward that crisis and you see it every once in a while. You read these articles and you go, 'Oh my gosh, they're spending more than they have.' And so our interest payments are higher and higher and higher. And then other governments are saying, 'No, we're not going to buy your debt unless you increase the rate.' And then if you increase the rate then you run the risk of a Silicon Valley bank collapse. If you don't increase the rate then you get inflation and then ultimately hyperinflation and the value of a dollar goes to 50 cents or 20 cents or wherever it goes over the course of a couple of years and it becomes a hot potato and nobody wants it. So that is not a good way to run an economy. So I would just say, you know, hedge, buy some Bitcoin, you know, just buy some Bitcoin.
Really interesting. I've never heard anyone frame the allocation in terms of runway whether it's for a personal family to survive and pay the bills and eat groceries or it's for a company to survive on a hyperinflation scenario. Usually when I think for a lot of people who are watching this who don't have that same kind of mindset that you do where you have your Bitcoiner mentality believe that the fiat collapse is inevitable and at some given point in time you have this runaway moment where the dollar goes to zero, Bitcoin goes to the moon and there's your hedge. Very very interesting take. Most people say you should allocate some X percentage to Bitcoin to your portfolio for the same reasons in a way but for portfolio management.
Yeah, for it's a little different. This is a little different. This is life management and you should have Bitcoin for life management.
That's a great message for anyone that's listening. I'm curious, inevitably when this debasement scenario comes and we get hyperinflation, I think about something completely inevitable if our government has a wakeup call and cuts spending by like what 80% or something. And the way they could do that, they could do it by utilizing AI in a big way and cutting staff significantly. If they were to do something like that, it would stave off what they've kicked down the road for so long and is now built up to be just a mountain that seems overwhelming to come and then you'd reinvigorate confidence in the dollar. But I don't think it's going to happen. I don't see this administration, the next administration, the last administration there. It doesn't matter Democrat, Republican, they all spend more than they have. And I think it's structural. I think our Congress thinks of money as monopoly money, funny money, and they just say, 'Oh, yeah, let's put another billion into that and a billion into that and a billion into that.' I think if our Congress had said okay last year we had this much and that's our budget for this year. This is how much we raised from taxes. So that's our budget for this year and all of our congressional argument can be around taking shares of what is available. So, shares of the budget. And so you might say, I've got, you know, I'm going to have a billion shares in order to support the building of a nuclear power plant, but that could end up being half a billion dollars. And if we know that it's really in effect a fixed amount then shares in that will dilute like my share if I'm a congressperson from Nebraska and you're from Illinois and I spend more shares you will lose more. But the way it works now is that I spend and you say, 'Well, okay, you get that money, but I'm going to do something and we're going to both.' So then we're spending twice as much. And that's what's happening in Congress. So it should work like the dilution as you, it should work like shares in a corporation. If I issue a bunch of shares, then everyone's ownership in a percentage way has decreased, but we all benefit more. And I think that's the way the congressional budget should go. But that's down the road. And it probably would never happen unless we had a major crisis. So in the meantime, I think there's a much higher likelihood of either an inflationary crisis or an interest rate crisis.
Yeah.
And the Fed is in a tough spot because and the Fed, you know, I mean, in a Bitcoin scenario, you don't really need a Fed, right? It's built in.
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So coming back to the dollar, a lot of people say that stable coins, you know, they've been embraced because they'll help save the dollar. Is that an accurate thing to say or is it something that just helps preserve like help build debt a little longer?
No, it actually, stable coins, I mean it's wonderful because more people are now using digital payments through stable coins. But a stable coin is tied to a dollar. So, as you issue more stable coins, they are naturally inflating the dollar, meaning making the dollar worth less. So I don't see that a stable coin, well, if a stable coin is tied to Bitcoin or tied to a cryptocurrency package, then that's one thing. If it's tied to the dollar, you are still subject to all of the irresponsible spending that happens in a government.
Yeah. So, do you think when you said that stable coins are wonderful to some degree because it's getting people on chain, do you think that that inevitably supports more human beings who haven't gone on chain before to get them familiar with what onchain feels like and that supports Bitcoin and maybe other, you know, important digital assets?
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, I've always thought of stable coin as a really positive thing as a bridge toward Bitcoin.
Bridge. Yeah. Gateway bridge.
You've said you'd love to see whole businesses using Bitcoin from, you know, payroll, taxes, suppliers, no bankers or lawyers required. How long do you think that takes?
You know, I think it's probably two more halvings. So this halving, you know, it's when people pay attention it's usually when the price really moves and whether it moves up or down and generally it moves up and then drops, plateaus, up, drops and then it gets bigger and bigger. And I think this halving, I mean I think there will be another wakeup call but I think we're going to need two more halvings. So, what's that? Four or five years before people agree that hey it really would be great to have like I'd love to be able to raise funds in Bitcoin, invest them all in Bitcoin, have my entrepreneurs pay their employees and suppliers and taxes in Bitcoin and have it all onchain without the need of an accountant, a lawyer, an auditor, bookkeeper, all of that because it would already be on chain on the blockchain in smart contracts built in done. And I think it takes some thought for people to realize and Congress people and people who would decide on this kind of thing have a lot of things on their plate. They're thinking about wars. They're thinking about abortions. And they're thinking about policies. They're thinking about all sorts of things. And this is just one of those things. And they have big lobbies of accountants and bookkeepers and auditors and whatever who don't really want things to change. And so it'll take sort of a big event for people to recognize that hey our economy will move much faster. We will be much wealthier as a society and will pull many many more people out of poverty and the unbanked will be a part of this world economy if we agree to make it so that people can operate their businesses in Bitcoin without having to convert it back to dollars and back to Bitcoin back to dollars back to Bitcoin just like a walled garden in Bitcoin. And then pay your taxes in Bitcoin and operate your business in Bitcoin and then you will have a much more frictionless society where money can move faster and society becomes wealthier. You know, when we operated with gold or with shells or whatever, the economy moved very slowly because you had to move that stuff around. But the promise of a government helped improve things. Promise of gold helped improve things. But Bitcoin's way faster and so that would really increase wealth in any country that adopts it.
There's been a lot of chatter recently that I haven't heard from a while and I was wondering what was going on with the Bitcoin strategic reserve act and I just saw recently that that's going to go into I think in front of house or something soon. Two-part question. One is I know that you're close and you know the Wall Street scene and probably talking to politicians and things like that probably in the discussion. Do you think it's going to pass eventually? And then would something like that be required before that last scenario we just talked about play out? Because when I in the early days of me talking about using Bitcoin for business and trying to convince other people to do it, they were worried about the volatility. And so I wonder if it'll take some sort of another level of adoption. United States buying it more like another narrative where Bitcoin kind of has a spike up, volatility eases off and then people will feel more comfortable using it.
I think we'll always have volatility but we'll see volatility going up. I actually, because I mean the halving thing creates this, you know, higher and higher and higher. But I don't know a single elected official politician who has won an election going against cryptocurrency. I think they've been crushed. So I think we have at least that we have a real political force going in favor of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. That is a strong political force and anybody who runs an election against it is going to have a really difficult time. In fact, I think pretty much any open seat went to the person who understood the value of having a Bitcoin economy.
So, is the answer to the first question about the reserve do you think it will likely eventually get put because if it doesn't pass then I imagine whoever voted against it is going to have a hard time getting reelected.
